MIT atmospheric science professor Richard Lindzen suggests that many claims regarding climate change are exaggerated and unnecessarily alarmist.
Richard Lindzen is the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Sciences, Emeritus at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
His full article is here, and worth reading:
http://merionwest.com/2017/04/25/richard-lindzen-thoughts-on-the-public-discourse-over-climate-change/
Here are some sentences I've chosen
to summarize the article:
"For over 30 years, I have been giving talks on the science of climate change. When,
however, I speak to a non-expert audience, and attempt to explain such
matters as climate sensitivity, the relation of global mean temperature
anomaly to extreme weather, that warming has decreased profoundly for
the past 18 years, etc., it is obvious that the audience’s eyes are
glazing over.
Since this issue fully emerged in public almost 30 years ago (and was instantly incorporated into the catechism of political correctness), there has been a huge increase in government funding of the area, and the funding has been predicated on the premise of climate catastrophism.
As in any demonization project, it begins with the ridiculous presumption that any warming whatsoever (and, for that matter, any increase in CO2) is bad, and proof of worse to come.
We know that neither of these presumptions is true. People retire to the Sun Belt rather than to the arctic. CO2 is pumped into greenhouses to enhance plant growth.
The emphasis on ‘warmest years on record’ appears to have been a response to the observation that the warming episode from about 1978 to 1998 appeared to have ceased and temperatures have remained almost constant since 1998.
Of course, if 1998 was the hottest year on record, all the subsequent years will also be among the hottest years on record. None of this contradicts the fact that the warming (ie, the increase of temperature) has ceased.
Of course, as Mencken noted, “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.”
The environmental movement has elevated this aim well beyond what Mencken noted.
Mars, which also has much more CO2 than the earth, is much further from the sun and very cold.
As we have seen many times already, such matters are mere details when one is in the business of scaring the public.
The accumulation of false and/or misleading claims is often referred to as the ‘overwhelming evidence’ for forthcoming catastrophe. Without these claims, one might legitimately ask whether there is any evidence at all.
The system we are looking at consists in two turbulent fluids interacting with each other.
They are on a rotating planet that is differentially heated by the sun.
A vital constituent of the atmospheric component is water in the liquid, solid and vapor phases, and the changes in phase have vast energetic ramifications.
The energy budget of this system involves the absorption and reemission of about 200 watts per square meter.
Doubling CO2 involves a 2% perturbation to this budget.
So do minor changes in clouds and other features, and such changes are common.
In this complex multi-factor system, what is the likelihood of the climate (which, itself, consists in many variables and not just globally averaged temperature anomaly) is controlled by this 2% perturbation in a single variable?
Believing this is pretty close to believing in magic.
Instead, you are told that it is believing in ‘science.’
Such a claim should be a tip-off that something is amiss.
After all, science is a mode of inquiry rather than a belief structure."